Day 260

Isaiah 25:1–28:13; Galatians 3:10-22; Psalm 61:1-8; Proverbs 23:17-18

But Christ has rescued us from the curse pronounced by the law. When he was hung on the cross, he took upon himself the curse for our wrongdoing. For it is written in the Scriptures, “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.” Through Christ Jesus, God has blessed the Gentiles with the same blessing he promised to Abraham, so that we who are believers might receive the promised Holy Spirit through faith.

These two verses from our reading in Galatians today encapsulate the crux of Paul’s theological position for presenting the gospel message to his fellow Hebrews —and his hope for the Gentiles. It also outlines what we would now call the doctrine of justification through faith.

Since Paul was martyred for his convictions, we know that he fully believed that Jesus had given him this revelation personally. And because we know Paul was trained in Mosaic law as a Pharisee, we can surmise the spiritual disruption this revelation brought to his personal life, long before he became a controversial figure in the early days of the church.

Paul’s experiences with Jesus flew in the face of what he thought he knew about God, not to mention his theological training. Following Jesus forced Paul to go back through the entire story of the Hebrew people —his own ethnicity. And it forced him to deeply consider Moses and his legacy while coming to his conclusions about the law.

Whereas Moses was the man whom God chose to lead His people out of Egyptian slavery and through whom the law was given, Paul looked to the story that happened long before Moses for answers —which brought him to Abraham, where God’s relationship with His people began.

God had made a promise to raise up a people through Abraham, through which all the nations of the world would be blessed. For Paul, this promise explicitly meant Gentiles. He realized that the entire Hebrew story actually began with a promise and not a law —a big distinction for Paul. Abraham believed the promise through faith, and God considered him righteous, not because he obeyed a rule, but because he trusted God and put his faith in Him. When the promise was made, there was no law. In fact, the law wouldn’t come for another 430 years (Galatians 3:17)!

Following this line of reasoning, the law couldn’t be the means by which a person could be made right with God, because Abraham —and everyone who believed the promise after him (including Moses) —didn’t have a law to obey in the first place.

Although what Paul taught sounded profoundly heretical (and even blasphemous), he was simply telling his fellow Hebrews their own story and revealing Jesus in it.

At the conclusion of today’s reading from Galatians, Paul summarized by saying, “Is there a conflict, then, between God’s law and God’s promises? Absolutely not! If the law could give us new life, we could be made right with God by obeying it. But the Scriptures declare that we are all prisoners of sin, so we receive God’s promise of freedom only by believing in Jesus Christ” (Galatians 3:21-22).

This is how we arrive at the doctrine of justification through faith that has been passed down through generations —and continues to affect hearts today.

MEDITATION:

Don’t envy sinners, but always continue to fear the LORD. You will be rewarded for this; your hope will not be disappointed.